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A
federal appellate court has ruled that Vimeo has limited liability over users’
uploading of almost 200 videos with infringing music recordings, rejecting
claims from record companies and publishers thatthey had shown that the site
had "red flag” knowledge of piracy and even "willful blindness” to copyright
violations.

The ruling from the three-judge panel of the 2nd
Circuit Court of Appeals is a victory not just for Vimeo but other
user-generated content sites and Internet providers, who have for years been
battling the content industry over the threshold at which they can be held
legally liable for infringing content…

"A copyright owner’s mere showing that a video
posted by a user on the service provider’s site includes substantially all of a
recording recognizable copyrighted music, and that an employee of the service
provider saw at least some part of the user’s material, is insufficient to
sustain the copyright owner’s burden of proving that the service provider had
either actual or red flag knowledge of the infringement,” the judges wrote.

They noted that "employees of service providers
cannot be assumed to have expertise in the laws of copyright.”